There were women of a similar type, in all sorts of capes, cloaks, jackets, boots and goloshes, equally at ease in spite of the hideousness of their garb; old and young they sat trading in goods of some sort, walking about, scolding and swearing. There were few people in the market. It was evidently over, and most of the people were ascending the hill, going through and past the market all in one direction. I followed them. The farther I went the more people of that sort there seemed to be, all going one way. Passing the market and going up the street I overtook two women: one old, the other young. Both wore tattered, drab clothes. They went along talking about some affair.
After each necessary word one or two unnecessary and most indecent words were uttered. Neither of them was drunk, they were preoccupied with something, and the men who met them and those who were behind and in front of them paid no attention to their way of speaking which seemed to me so strange. It was evident that here people always talked like that. To the left were private dosshouses, and some turned into them while others went farther.
Ascending the hill we came to a large corner house. Most of those among whom I had been walking stopped there. All along the pavement and on the snow in the street people of the same type stood and sat. To the right of the entrance door were the women, to the left the men. I passed both the women and the men (there were some hundreds of them), and stopped where the line ended. The house outside which they were waiting was the Lyapin Free Night-Lodging-House. The crowd were lodgers awaiting admission. At 5 p.m. the doors open and people are let in. Nearly all those I had overtaken were on their way here.
I stopped where the line of men ended. Those nearest began to look at me and drew me to them by their glances. The tatters covering their bodies were very various, but the expression in all the eyes directed towards me was just the same. They all seemed to ask: ‘Why have you, a man from a different world, stopped near us? Who are you? A self-satisfied rich man who wishes to enjoy our misery to relieve his dullness and to torture us or are you what does not and cannot exist-a man who pities us?’ This question was on every face. They joked, caught my eye, and turned away. I wanted to speak to some one of them, but could not make up my mind to do so for a long time.
But while we were yet silent our glances already drew us together. Widely as life had divided us, after our glances had met twice or thrice, we felt that we were akin and we ceased to tear one another. Nearest to me stood a peasant with a swollen face and a red beard, in a torn coat and with worn-out galoshes on his bare feet. There were eight degrees Reaumur of frost. I met his glance three or four times, and felt so near to him that instead of being ashamed to speak to him I should have been ashamed not to say something. I asked where he came from. He answered readily and began talking, while others drew near.
He was from Smolensk, and had come to seek work, hoping to be able to buy grain and pay his taxes. ‘There is no work to be got,’ said he. ‘The soldiers2 have taken all the work. So I am knocking about, and God knows I have not eaten for two days!’ He spoke timidly, with an attempt at a smile. A seller of hot drinks,3 an old soldier, was standing near and I called him. He poured out a glass. The peasant took it in his hands and, trying not to lose any of the heat, warmed them with it before drinking. While doing so he told me his adventures (the adventures, or the stories of them told by these men, were almost all alike).
He had had a little work but it came to an end; and then his purse with his passport and what money he had had been stolen here in the Night-Lodging-House. Now he could not get away from Moscow. He said that during the day he warmed himself in the drink-shops and ate scraps of bread which were sometimes given to him; but sometimes they drove him out. He got his night’s lodging free in Lyapin House. He was now only waiting for a police-search, when he would be put in prison for having no passport, and sent by etapeA to his native place. ‘They say there will be a police search on Thursday,’ added he. (Prison and the etape were to him like the Promised Land.)
While he was telling me this two or three others among the crowd confirmed his words and said they were in the same plight. A lean youth, pale, long-nosed, with nothing over his shirt (which was torn at the shoulder) and with a peakless cap, pushed his way
1 Fourteen degrees above zero Fahrenheit.-A. M.
2 Soldiers were often hired out to work at cheap rates.-A. M.
3 sbiten, made with honey and spices.-A. M.
4 On foot, with others, under escort.-A. M.
sidelong to me through the crowd. He was shivering violently all the time, but tried to smile contemptuously at the peasant’s speech, thinking thereby to adapt himself to my tone, and he looked me in the face. I offered him, too, some sbiten. On taking the glass he also warmed his hands on it, but he had only begun to speak when he was shoved aside by a big, black, aquiline-nosed fellow in a print shirt and a waistcoat but no cap. The aquiline-nosed man asked for some sbiten. Then followed a tall, drunken old man with a pointed beard, in an overcoat tied round the waist with a cord, and wearing bast-shoes. Then came a little fellow with a swollen face and watery eyes, in a brown nankeen pea-jacket, with bare knees showing through the holes in his summer trousers and knocking together from cold.
He shivered so that he could not hold the glass but spilled it over himself. The others began to abuse him, but he only smiled pitifully and shivered. Then came a crooked, deformed man in tatters, and with strips of linen tied round his bare feet; then something that looked like an officer, then something that looked like a cleric, then something strange and noseless: all, hungry, cold, importunate and submissive, crowded round me and pressed near the sbiten till it was all finished. One man asked for money and I gave him some.
Another asked, and a third, and then the crowd besieged me. Disorder and a crush ensued. A porter from the next house shouted to them to get off the pavement in front of his house and they submissively obeyed his command. Organizers appeared among the crowd, who took me under their protection. They wished to extricate me from the crush; but the crowd that had at first stretched along the pavement had now become disorganized and gathered round me.
They all looked at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful, more jaded, and more degraded than, the last. I gave away all I had with me, which was not much, only some twenty rubles (£2), and following the crowd I entered the Night-Lodging-House. It was an immense building consisting of four departments. On the top stories were the men’s lodgings and on the lower stories the women’s. First I entered the latter: a large room all filled with bunks like the berths in third-class Russian railway cars. They were arranged in two tiers, above and below. Women old and young strange, tattered, with no outdoor garments entered and took possession of their bunks: some below and some above. Some of the older ones crossed themselves and prayed for the founder of this refuge.
Others laughed and swore. I went upstairs. There the men were taking their places. Among them I saw one of those to whom I had given money. On seeing him I suddenly felt dreadfully ashamed and hurried away. Arid feeling as if I had committed a crime, I left the house and went home. There, ascending the carpeted steps to the cloth-carpeted hall and taking off my fur coat, I sat down to a five-course dinner, served by two lackeys in dress clothes with white ties and white gloves.
Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how, in the presence of thousands of spectators, they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defence of that kind of action, and I knew it was done deliberately and intentionally, but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense, and that however many people may combine to
